The four original cast members of classic sitcom Will & Grace – Debra Messing, Eric McCormack, Megan Mullally and Sean Hayes – hadn’t all been in the same room together for over ten years when they slipped back into their characters to make a video in support of Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid last year.

As the world now knows, they failed in their objective – but while they were there something magical happened.

‘It felt like we’d all just been away for the weekend,’ says Megan, who played honking-voiced, cocktail-swigging rich girl Karen Walker in the original series, which ran from 1998 to 2006. ‘It was weird, because there we were ten years on and we didn’t feel any different.’

Debra Messing, Eric McCormack, Megan Mullally and Sean Hayes return for a new series of Will & Grace ten years after the last episode aired

So potent was the chemistry between the four that this week the new series of Will & Grace is coming to Channel 5.

In it Debra reprises her role as flighty interior designer Grace Adler, with Eric as her best friend, neurotic gay corporate lawyer Will Truman.

RELATED ARTICLES

Share this article

Share

Sean is bad boy Jack McFarland, Will’s pal, while Karen works for Grace’s company. Back-up comes from Shelley Morrison as Rosario, Karen’s maid. Now, more than a decade older and not much wiser, they’re back – and the one-liners zing back and forth as swiftly as they ever did.

The new show is firmly set in 2017, with references to the Trump administration (Karen is best buddies with Melania) and internet dating.

Jack discovers he’s a grandfather, Grace is coping with her ever-expanding business and, as always, Will provides the voice of (relative) sanity among it all.

Eric has hardly been idle in the past decade. He’s appeared on stage, starred in three TV series and is currently to be seen in the Netflix time-travelling show Travelers.

But he says that for all his success, Will & Grace will always hold a special place in his heart. ‘The four of us were just children – we were idiots, and out of the idiocy came the real fun of the show, the silliness of it,’ he says.

In it Debra reprises her role as flighty interior designer Grace Adler, with Eric as her best friend, neurotic gay lawyer Will Truman. Pictured: The cast in the original series

He and the others kept in touch as far as their itinerant lifestyles allowed. ‘Sean and I have seen each other’s plays and I go to see Megan, who’s a singer too, in concert whenever I can,’ says Eric.

‘I probably keep up most of all with Debra. She lives in New York, and when we’re there together we go out for dinner. That’s so much fun because we watch the people in the restaurant as they realise Will and Grace are having dinner in the corner. But as far as having the four of us in one room? I don’t think it happened once in ten years – so when we got back together it was pretty special.’

The last season of Will & Grace saw the pair’s lives neatly tied up for several years into the future, with Will raising his son with Vince (Bobby Cannavale) and Grace raising her daughter with Leo (Harry Connick Jnr). This time around, says Eric, the two will be reunited.

‘Let’s put it this way, they’re still living together so there hasn’t been a tremendous evolution in terms of maturity!’ he chuckles.

‘We have to address the fact that our characters both had relationships that mattered, but they ended. You have two people turning 50 who are doing well professionally but who still can’t keep a relationship together except for this one key friendship.’

As for how the writers will explain the fact that both their partners and offspring have vanished, Debra – who in real life is single mother to 13-year-old Roman from her former marriage to actor and screenwriter Daniel Zelman – says we’ll have to wait and see. ‘In the first scene we address how the last series ended, and what you’ll learn is that Will and Grace are both single, don’t have children, and are living in the same apartment again.’

Megan Mullally is happy to confirm that in the new series Karen will not have become any more lovable.

‘Lovable? She’s worse than ever! She’s had 11 years to develop all her horrible traits and I don’t think there’s going to be any improvement. Right now she’s best friends with Melania Trump, so you can only imagine how insufferable she is.’

Sean says his character hasn’t really changed fundamentally. ‘Jack will still be Jack. He has a healthy ego, and what I love best about him is his delusion of grandeur, his idea that he has wisdom to offer to the world about life.’

Key to it all, they agree, is the real friendship between them. ‘We had chemistry from the beginning,’ says Debra, ‘and we believe it’s because we all got our start in theatre. It’s a different way of working to TV. It’s about taking risks and trusting each other, and knowing we could fail miserably and it would still be OK.’